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PHP 5 Release Candidate 2 Released 39

Posted by timothy from the pronounced-with-lips dept.
alexre1 writes "From the PHP website: 'The second Release Candidate of PHP 5 is now available! This mostly bug fix release improves PHP 5's stability and irons out some of the remaining issues before PHP 5 can be deemed release quality. Note that it is still not recommended for mission-critical use but people are encouraged to start playing with it and report any problems.' Cool! Hopefully we'll have a stable PHP 5.0 soon."
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PHP 5 Release Candidate 2 Released More

PHP 5 Release Candidate 2 Released

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  • PHP5 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Leffe ( 686621 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @01:09PM (#8965642)
    I run PHP5 on one of my developer boxes(I should install it on the other one too, but I'm lazy), and as far as I know it's completely back-compatible(except from some new reserved keywords, but that's easy to fix). All the new features are really nice, and I have to say that I noticed a tiny gain in speed too.

    There's no reason not to switch to PHP5, everyone please do it now! Writing back-compatible code is no fun, I want to use all the new and exciting OOP features.

    Here [php.net]'s a page describing all the new features in PHP5 and the ZEND engine version 2!

    • Re:PHP5 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by eddy the lip ( 20794 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @01:21PM (#8965708)
      ...and as far as I know it's completely back-compatible(except from some new reserved keywords, but that's easy to fix)

      If this is true, it takes away one of my major fears about PHP5. They haven't exactly been careful about this in the past, and there's been more than one occasion where I was franticaly updating mounds of code because they decided something should be spelled different.

      I've been keeping half an eye on the changes, and the only thing that had twigged as a possible issue so far was in classes, especially changing the default contstructor. Changing the name of a constructor isn't a big deal in itself, but I'd be doing it in a lot of code, distributed across many, many sites. I'd be very happy to put this particular fear to rest.

      That aside, I am looking forward to the new OOP features. 95% of what I write is OOP, and there are some things in there I've been wanting for a long time.

      • All of the changes made so far have been for good reasons, usually security. The $GLOBALS change was a major boon to security, and I'm personally glad that one of the 4.3.x releases broke the invalid $array[key] notation as it'll teach people to RTFM once in a while. If something breaks in your code 99% of the time it is your fault.

        Damien
        Web developer for four+ years

        • I'd ammend that to most changes have been for good reasons. In my post above, I was thinking specifically of the $HTTP_VARS_ change. Granted, typing $_POST is a heckuva lot nicer, but I really wish more thought had been put into how to handle that. There have also been a number of changes in how individual functions behave between point releases where the only rationale seemed to be that they thought it looked nicer the new way. (It usually did, but don't go doing things like that unless you give people an

          • Incorrect. Or grossly oversimplfied.

            The VM that will run Perl 6 will also be able to run Perl 5. Just as you can use Java to call GTK+, written in C, you can use Perl 6 to call Perl 5 things. You dont say that Java is reverse compatable with C, because it isn't. Perl 6 isn't reverse comptable with Perl 5, because it isn't.

            The Perl 6 interpeter/VM/compiler is a compleate rewite... So much so that it isnt Perl, its Parrot. But Perl 5 isn't a rewite of Perl 5, as in: start with a blank spec. Perl 5 is a star

          • > > If something breaks in your code 99% of the time it is your fault.
            >
            > I'd argue that lacking a formal specification, the language is
            > the final arbiter of what's correct. If it compiles and runs, it's
            > correct. It might be shite code, but if it breaks afterwards because
            > of a change in the language, it's hardly the fault of the coder.

            When the I and B tags were no longer valid in XHTML, was it the fault of the W3C that web code was invalid?

            > There have also been a number of chang
        • the invalid $array[key] notation

          Damien, clue me in? Links? References? Explanations?

    • I think most people look for stability, before backward compatibility.

    • Re:PHP5 (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anthony Boyd ( 242971 )
      as far as I know it's completely back-compatible

      Except for the whole copy-by-reference thing. Of course the new way is better, but people who relied on the old way might be surprised by some unexpected values.

      There's no reason not to switch to PHP5, everyone please do it now!

      Except that "it is still not recommended for mission-critical use," right?

      • Except for the whole copy-by-reference thing. Of course the new way is better, but people who relied on the old way might be surprised by some unexpected values.

        From the annoucement:

        The Zend Engine I compatibility mode (zend.ze1_compatibility_mode) has been re-implemented to more accurately support PHP 4's object auto-clone behavior.

        So, hopefully, this was fixed.

        Except that "it is still not recommended for mission-critical use," right?

        Naturally. It's a release candidate, remember?

    • Wrong. I put php5 up on a very large website and there were multiple errors, mainly in class design. It is not a drop in replacement for php4, it requires a rewrite a php4 code.

  • hello?!? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Charles Dart ( 731692 ) <Charles_Dart@hotmail.com> on Sunday April 25, 2004 @01:26PM (#8965753)

    Considering how much of the web runs on PHP, I am surprized at the lack of interest in this new release. PHP 5 when combined with MySQL 4 is going to do some amazing things.

    Wake up you people!

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